Online student
As I mentioned in my previous post, my classes are all online, so as part of one of my courses I learned how taking classes online differs from taking physical classes.
After taking a couple of online assessments, I realized that although I do posses some skills which are useful towards an online course (my organizational skills) there are other aspects I need to work on, such as time management skills. I decided since I am going to school full time that a good way to work on my time management skills is to give each class I’m taking a scheduled time, as if I was actually going to a classroom. That way I know from, say, 10am-12pm it’s time to work on class A and 1pm-3pm it’s time for class B.
Another thing I hadn’t thought of was how when you write something down and a stranger who has never met you is reading it, they might not understand certain aspects about your personality, writing style, etc. so comments that you write without much thought, someone else might read as angry or sarcastic. This is completely something that I’ve dealt with especially with social media, and I’ve been on both ends as the misunderstood and the one misunderstanding. It’s a good tip to not only re-read before posting but also to re-read what someone else wrote because often one missed word can make all the difference.
I also watched a couple of videos about working in groups. The first video of a presentation by Dr. Haycock made me laugh just because of all the examples of how groups work were so familiar. It was nice to know that all my “bad” experiences with groups are actually common and so there are ways to combat them. There were good tips on clarifying what the assignment is, what the group goal actually is (“I want an A but Joe Student is aiming for a B so doesn’t want to try as hard as I do”) and just being ok with conflict and knowing that is part of how a group works. From the second video, I really took away the fact that group work is a useful skill for the workplace. You can apply the skills you learned working with groups to later work with colleagues. So it’s best to try to make a group the best experience you can because you’ll never know when it might come up.
